


Good Practice

by OfWilsonDreams



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: M/M, how Gunnar and Antonio first met, soulmates in the Good Place, the good place - Freeform, wow it is difficult to tag without spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 13:59:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13249692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfWilsonDreams/pseuds/OfWilsonDreams
Summary: This story is set in The Good Place, just before the series starts, but contains a whopping spoiler for the whole of season one. If you have not seen season one, this story will either make no sense to you at all or will spoiler you completely. Please don't read it until you have seen all thirteen episodes of season one. I can't and won't say anything more about it.





	Good Practice

It is a little-known fact that while Heaven is a walled city and only the selected billions will be permitted through the thousand gates to dwell within in perfect harmony, Hell is infinite. There is no end to Hell, no matter how far you travel. Each saved soul who enters Heaven is counted, and though only the Throne of Heaven knows the number, everyone in Heaven and Hell knows there is a fixed number of souls of all those who ever lived and who will someday die, who will dwell in the City of Heaven. The heavenly hosts of angels are also counted, their number known as they fly in formation before the Throne endlessly singing the praises of Heaven. 

But the demons of Hell are uncountable, for in every instant of Hell, a new demon is created, and each demon then joins the throng of those whose only will and desire is to torment the damned, and though Hell is infinite, the number of those condemned to be tormented there is not: there are always infinitely more demons than damned souls in Hell.

The demons zbuahjhjeanm and eahjpnuohjoiuo were not friends, because friendship is not a demonic concept: but they had come into being within moments of each other, and were almost exactly the same rank and degree of training. Like thousands of new demons, they had been sent in packs to crawl within the damned and burn them from the inside outward: they had feasted on charred livers and drunk the screams of the damned like milk, side by side for centuries, growing in size and intelligence, learning to know each other's molten stone bodies as well as they knew the bodies of those they devoured living and left in eternal torment. 

They were summoned to the Presence at the same time, with a few dozen other demons about their size and age, and in a moment, gifted with a human body each to wear: and then zbuahjhjeanm and eahjpnuohjoiuo sat next to each other on the black marble flooring, stealing glances at each other out of the corner of the small squishy round objects seated in hollows in what they must learn to call their _faces_ , as they practiced - as they had been warned they would need to practice - the human arts of breathing, swallowing, moving limbs on purpose, and allowing the smooth muscles of the squishy object inside the chest to keep moving blood in the proper directions around the inside of the body, not the outside. 

Once they had learned these important skills, they were allowed to practice standing up, sitting back down again, standing up while grabbing on to each other, hugging each other, and together learning how to consume what humans regard as edible food and drink. After that, they practiced digestion, farting, pissing, and crapping, and then negotiating with a Bad Janet for toilet paper and clothing. 

They had been assigned to a Bad Place where humans would be tormented by demons wearing human bodies: this was where they would work for the next thousand years. 

Hell is infinite, but demons have a proper regard for time. 

"You will need to have human names," the Architect told them. "I am Michael. You - " he pointed at zbuahjhjeanm - "will be Antonio," and you - he pointed at eahjpnuohjoiuo - "will be Gunnar. I have been assigned three hundred and sixteen demons, and you are the youngest, but I know you'll work hard. Remember, you can lose your bodies as easily as you were given them, and you will return to your lives as pack demons, burning and consuming the damned without any emotional connection."

"Why would we want an 'emotional connection'?" zbuahjhjeanm asked. 

"Because it makes their pain complex, subtle, and delicious," Michael told zbuahjhjeanm. "Like frozen yogurt."

"What is frozen yogurt?" eahjpnuohjoiuo asked.

"You'll find out." Michael handed each of them a briefing scroll. "Stuff it up your nose until it connects with your input point. I'd prefer you not to scream on data entry. Then everything will be clear. Or at least, clearer than it is at present."

eahjpnuohjoiuo and zbuahjhjeanm looked at each other again. They were very young demons, but not too young to have failed to learn that the infinite demons of Hell constantly pass torments on to those above them in the demonic Lowerarchy. "Data entry" was as unfamiliar a term to them as "frozen yogurt", but they understood the instruction not to scream: young as they were, they had already told demons younger than themselves not to scream when things were done to them.

But Michael was unquestionably far below them in the Lowerarchy: he was certainly more than a thousand years old, he was unquestionably one of the Architects of Hell, and they were not yet able to handle their human bodies efficiently. 

Simultaneously, they each pressed the briefing scroll they had been given into their left nostril, and kept pushing it in, until, with a click, it joined an internal organ they had not previously been aware of. Information flooded into their nearly-unused brains. And they screamed.

When they stopped screaming, they turned to look at each other again, and understood a great deal more about each other and about the situation they were in then they had known before. They reached out and plucked the briefing scroll from each other's nostrils: the scrolls withered into red hot ash and crumbled as they dropped them on the floor.

"I would like to be Gunnar," zbuahjhjeanm said. "I feel an emotional connection to that name."

"I would like to be Antonio," eahjpnuohjoiuo said. "Also, I would like to try strawberry frozen yogurt."

"Personal preferences already!" Michael exclaimed. He sounded pleased. "Excellent! You can go through that door into the Bad Place, or as we are calling it, the Good Place. I will be briefing the four humans in half an hour and will need an assortment of you demons to make a crowd. Be garbed appropriately. If you need anything, ask Janet."

"We know how to negotiate with Bad Janet," Gunnar said proudly.

"Oh no," said Michael, with a little smile. "This Place has a Good Janet. You don't have to negotiate, you just ask. But remember - " He had an expression on his face that they were now able to interpret as Stern Authority " - Good Janet can only provide the kind of things a human in a Good Place would ask for. Clothing, food, furniture, musical instruments, alcohol, drugs. No asking for instruments of torture or a live volcano with acid lakes to drop a human into and watch them boil to death while their flesh dissolves, or anything like that. Remember, this is my Place, I am the Architect, I know everything you're doing. Let's be careful in there."

"Very good," said Gunnar, with a grin.

"Even better," said Antonio, also grinning.

Neither of them had quite understood "grin" before, and doing it felt good. They walked out of Michael's office, into what they had understood would be the Bad Place designed to look like a Good Place, and found themselves in a different office.

There were a lot of demons there, most of them as new as Gunnar and Antonio to their human bodies, by the wriggling and shifting and smelling of the flesh. 

And at the centre of the room there was the Chief Architect, a demon so far down in the Lowerarchy that they had heard of him only by reputation. As Gunnar and Antonio entered, the Chief Architect spoke.

"You are all assigned to Michael's Bad Place. I shall see you all there, from time to time, when I visit: the name I shall use there is Shawn. This Bad Place is a idea Michael has put forward, to make humans torment each other: Michael thinks this will revolutionize how we do torture in Hell. If Michael is wrong, this will be a retirement project."

To a demon, born in infinity and expecting to live forever, there is only one way to retire: to be torn into little living shreds and those shreds scattered over the surface of a sun to burn forever, eternally conscious, eternally in agony, and eternally shredded. 

Most of the demons in the Chief Architect's office were too new in-body to know how to do a shocked gasp, or even a frozen silence. 

"I am not saying that any of you will retire," said the Chief Architect, after a pause as if personally savoring their fear. "But Michael will. For each of you, this will be a test. Can you pass as human, in a near-human environment, behaving and talking and even eating and drinking as humans do, tormenting the four assigned to you only in human ways? If you can do so successfully, you may pass lower in the Lowerarchy when this assignment is over, and yourselves become Architects. If not - early retirement is always an option."

The Chief Architect disappeared. A door opened, an archway into somewhere unpleasantly clean and only moderately bright: the artificial sun in the blue sky wasn't set to bake or burn or blind. 

Gunnar and Antonio looked at each other. Friendship is not a demonic concept: but each of them reached out their hand to the other, took hold of it - after some fumbling, because this was their first time - and managed what they both thought looked like a convincing human handshake. 

"We'll do it," Gunnar said. 

"Together," Antonio said.

"Strawberry frozen yogurt?" Gunnar asked, as they walked forward through the arch. "I think I want french vanilla."

**Author's Note:**

> Gunnar and Antonio are that lovely couple we meet for the first time in episode three of the Good Place who are so enthusiastic about garbage clean-up. Now, knowing what we know after the end of season one about everyone in the Good Place except for Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason, I did wonder... how did Gunnar and Antonio meet? And this is the answer.


End file.
